Crushing news out of Uganda last week. The Bush administration's $1 billion experiment in using abstinence messages as the basis of HIV prevention has born its first fruit: In a public speech on May 18, Uganda's AIDS Commissioner Kihumuro Apuuli announced that HIV infections have almost doubled in Uganda over the past two years, from 70,000 in 2003 to 130,000 in 2005. And despite this chilling wake-up call, Bush has empowered Christian right activists to continue to push their abstinence-only agenda at a UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS, to begin next week. According to a State Department email I obtained, the official U.S. delegation is stacked with some of the very people who contributed to the debacle in Uganda.

Uganda was once an HIV prevention success story, where an ambitious government-sponsored prevention campaign, including massive condom distribution and messages about delaying sex and reducing numbers of partners, pushed HIV rates down from 15 percent in the early 1990s to 5 percent in 2001. But conservative evangelicals rewrote this history--with the full-throated cooperation of Uganda's evangelical first family, the Musevenis. As one Family Research Council paper put it:

"Both abstinence and monogamy helped to curb the spread of AIDS in Uganda...How did this happen? Shortly after he came into office in 1986, President Museveni of Uganda spearheaded a mass education campaign promoting a three-pronged AIDS prevention message: abstinence from sexual activity until marriage; monogamy within marriage; and condoms as a last resort. The message became commonly known as ABC: Abstain, Be faithful, and use Condoms if A and B fail."

This warped version of the true Uganda story became the mantra in Bush's Washington, with the "C" reduced more and more to an afterthought as time went by. For example, in piling on against a 2002 pro-condom comment by then Secretary of State Colin Powell, Focus on the Family's James Dobson wrote condoms out of the story entirely: "Secretary Powell seems to be ignorant of the fact the Uganda has made great progress against AIDS by emphasizing abstinence, not condoms." Soon, players connected with the Christian right, from Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse to Anita Smith's Children's AIDS Fund, cashed in to the tune of millions of dollars in federal grants to spread the abstinence message in Uganda, the Christian rights' new showcase for a morality-based approach to AIDS. In the case of Smith's outfit, her proposal was shot down by a scientific review committee, but politics prevailed: the head of U.S. AID overruled the experts and demanded that the program be funded.

Anita Smith has long been a close ally of Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator James Dobson helped get elected who is so fanatically pro-abstinence that he has pushed for warning labels on condoms and once demanded the ouster of the head of the Centers for Disease Control for promoting condom use. Coburn's legislative director, Roland Foster, used to regularly send out Children's AIDS Fund emails trashing HIV prevention organizations for being too sexually explicit and calling for them to be investigated and defunded. (Many were.) Once Coburn, a former Congressman, was elected to the Senate in 2004, President Bush picked Smith to replace Coburn as the head of his Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Now, according to the State Department email printed below, she's an official U.S. delegate to next week's UN Special Session on AIDS.

Another official U.S. delegate, Melissa Pardue, now a White House functionary, until recently used her perch as a Heritage Foundation policy analyst to supply the Christian right with their talking points on abstinence-only education, forwarding the false claims that multiple scientific studies show that abstinence-only education works (in fact the most persuasive data shows that people who pledge abstinence are at greater risk for getting sexually transmitted diseases) and that the federal government spends far more on comprehensive sex ed (the feds spend almost zero on the latter, but Pardue tiptoes around that by counting all the funds that go to family planning clinics to provide medical care).

Together Smith and Pardue have been key players in injecting abstinence-only ideology into the Washington echo chamber.

Other delegates include Michael Gerson, President Bush's evangelical former speechwriter, famous for his turns of phrase that appealed to the Christian right, and Pastor Herbert Lusk, the former footballer known as the "praying tailback" and a passionate proponent of Bush's faith-based initiative. Neither have any background in HIV/AIDS.

Just in case we wondered whether Bush was serious about confronting AIDS, two more names on the delegate list give us a hint: his daughter Barbara Bush and her party playmate Maggie Betts are both listed as "senior advisors."

In previous administrations, delegations to these high-level UN meetings typically included mainstream public health experts such as the American Public Health Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Nurses Association. Now we have abstinence advocates peddling fake science, New York socialites, and professional evangelizers.

Already, according to Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, a Washington, DC-based advocacy organization, the United States is pushing hard at the UN to block time-bound targets for treating the 10 million people worldwide who urgently need HIV medications. And, not surprisingly given its roster of advisors, the U.S. has also demanded removal of any language referring to condoms in the declaration that comes out of next week's meeting.

There's a protest scheduled for next week at the UN, for those who happen to be in New York City.

MASSIVE AIDS Street protest IN NYC, MAY 31 AS WORLD LEADERS GATHER AT UN Special Session on AIDS

-- Coinciding with 25th Anniversary of First AIDS Diagnoses, Thousands are Expected to Protest Failed Promises of Leadership, Call for Greater Commitment to HIV Prevention and Treatment --

WHAT: Thousands of people living with HIV, civil society delegates and other AIDS activists from around the world are mobilizing around the upcoming UN high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS where governments will review
progress on their 2001 commitments. A coalition of AIDS service and advocacy
groups is staging a large rally and march to hold leaders accountable for the 15 million AIDS deaths and 25 million new HIV infections since 2001.

Several activists from around the globe will speak outside the UN followed by a march to the UN missions of Uganda, Nigeria, India and the US to demand universal access to AIDS treatment and comprehensive, science-based HIV prevention, including condoms, in communities around the world.

Demonstrators will wear the famous anti stigma "HIV-POSITIVE" t-shirt, popularized by South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, in solidarity with the 40 million people living with HIV around the world.

with so much background on how this sickening situation has come to pass.

There's a related diary on the "Recommended" list at Daily Kos tonight -- Abstinence education backfiring in Uganda? -- where I've left a comment with a link to your story, in the hope that it receives an even wider circulation.

Thank you very much for reporting on this--one of the things that is drastically underreported, IMHO, is the fact that these "abstinence only" policies have Real Life health consequences--and usually not for the better.

Thanks for catching my mistake on Tom Coburn -- some kind of Freudian slip caused by that recent abortion ban in South Dakota. Just curious -- what attracted your family to Coburn? Is it because James Dobson is behind him? Is it support for his moral values agenda?

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